FIRST (SCOTS) SERMONS “LISTENING TO THE SONGS OF CHRISTMAS” Scripture Lessons: Isaiah 40:9-11; Luke 1:39-55 This sermon was preached by Dr. Joseph S. Harvard III on Sunday, December 20, 2015 at First (Scots) Presbyterian Church in Charleston, South Carolina.

Gracious God, once again in this season, we come and listen to familiar words and sing songs about an old magnificent story. We pray that we will listen with attentive ears, and that you will open our hearts to hear the Good News of the Gospel. Hearing that Good News, enable us to respond with faith, hope, and love. All this we are bold to ask in the name of the One who came to live among us, Christ our Lord. Amen.

Christmas is a special time. Reading letters from friends far and near is a welcomed and enjoyable ritual this time of the year. How I look forward to catching up with distant family that I don’t see very often and friends with whom I’m seldom in contact. There is, I admit, the occasional letter that is over the top! I recently read a take on one of those letters. Let me share it with you.

Dear Friends and Loved Ones, Christmas greetings to all! It’s been a wonderful year for us in every way. Our youngest grandchild graduated magna cum laude from kindergarten. Her teenage brother rode in a bicycle race across Australia, and of course he came in first. And you remember our oldest daughter who got a PhD in physics. Will this year she received the Nobel Peace Prize for Physics. As for ourselves, we are still blessed with great teeth, flat abdomens, perfect eye sight and wrinkle-free complexions. We hope you’ve had a good year too.

It’s hard to connect with letters like this. One of the questions I am asked often is, “What is Christmas?” Is it a time to step away from reality? Is it a high we go through every year that maybe reinforces what’s good and then we go back to the routine? Is it a pause in our hectic and crazy lives? Or is Christmas, as the story in Luke’s gospel tells us, the announcement of Good News that a child was born, and that God was keeping the promises he made to God’s people? A story not to encourage us to run away from the realities of life but one that faces reality with faith, hope and love.

This year has been a rough year for many. I remember a song by Anne Murray in 1980 called “A Little Good News.” I think that is true of us, and one thing continues to be driven home to me is that the good news comes to us in the music of the season.

One of the leading theologians of the last century was Reinhold Niebuhr. He taught theology at Union Theological Seminary in New York. He was an advisor to four presidents on foreign policy, and he helped to shape the Cold War policy of this country. He wrote an essay in 1933 entitled, “A Christmas Service in Retrospect.” He says: “On Christmas I really liked to go to the cathedrals and listen to concerts more than I liked to listen to sermons or preach sermons because the songs carry the story.” Well, that’s not very encouraging to a preacher who has to preach on the Sunday before Christmas. But I agree with him. It’s in the music and songs that we find the essence of this announcement of Good News. It’s been this way with God’s people down through the centuries. God’s people were in exile for 50 years. It had 1 been 50 years since they had been uprooted and taken from their homes. They were beginning to doubt whether God cared about them anymore. They were afraid. They were being asked to adjust to a strange culture. The prophet Isaiah said to get yourself to a mountain and hear a herald. Hear a song of good tidings that will comfort your fear.

We come to hear the songs but about this time every year if you go to church, you might hear a preacher preach a sermon against singing the songs too early. You know the issues of going to the shopping malls in October and November and hearing Christmas carols. Ministers don’t usually like that. It defies the meaning of Advent and it seems to many to be the commercialization of Christmas.

Now let me be honest with you. I’ve preached those kinds of sermons before. But I’m here to tell you this morning I have some second thoughts about that for this reason. Two things made me change my mind. One is if you’re walking through a shopping mall and people are frantically going here and there, what’s wrong with hearing someone come on the loud speaker and talk about “Joy to the world the Lord is come?” Some folks may never hear that during the season. Or how about “the hope and fears of all the years are met in you tonight?” That’s one reason my mind is changed. It may not be a totally bad thing to hear that we hear the songs of Zion, the heralds of good tiding in our commercial centers. Another thing I realized is that one of the first Christmas carols, The Magnificat, was sung ahead of time. Jesus had not been born yet. Mary had only been told by an angel that she was bearing a child who would be God’s son. And yet she committed herself to that, and she not only committed herself she broke into song.

The Good News comes to us first of all in a Christmas song. Not from a celebrity but from a young woman. “How can this be?” she asked. How can it be that God chooses in this way to come and dwell among us? Blessed are you, Mary, because despite your fear and trembling, you are willing to trust in God and follow God’s lead. Blessed are you too, each one of you, who are willing to put your lives, your gifts, your resources in the service of God because that is what made Mary blessed.

At this point, Mary breaks into song ahead of time, like those carols in October and November. There is no child yet: there is only the promise of a child. She begins with words of praise and gratitude. She trusts the goodness of the God who has created her. It’s evident in this song. She does that even though they were living under the power of a strict ruler named Herod, even though she did not have much in terms of earthly treasures. And then she asks a question all of us ask. We look around and see the pain and suffering in our world and in our lives. We ask, “Is it always going to be like this?” She says:

“This one who is coming will scatter the proud in the thoughts of their hearts. He will bring down the powerful from their thrones. He will send the rich away empty.” (Lk 1:51b-52, 53b)

Nobody puts those words on Hallmark cards. But downtrodden people, people who feel the weight of the world on their shoulders, are relieved to know that help is on the way. That God has not deserted us. That God is in this struggle with us. I think our Lord heard his mother sing that song. Remember what he said in the Beatitudes? “Blessed are the poor…Blessed are the peacemakers…Blessed are those who weep for you will be comforted…” (Lk 6:20–25).

Where did he get that? From his mother maybe? Did he learn from her that God has no intention of tolerating the injustice and greed and suffering of this world? That it’s unacceptable for children to go to bed hungry? 2

And that God is at work in this world through God’s people to make a difference? God’s Gift Shop is one way we do that.

God comes among us to tell us that God will set things right. God so loved the world that he showed that love aright when half spent was the night. God comes to us, keeps pushing us, leading us, guiding us.

Whatever your station in life, whatever the circumstances of your life, the message of Mary’s song that she sang ahead of time is that God will set things right. And the same message that she heard, that God’s people heard when they were in exile, is spread throughout the Bible over and over again.

You hear that refrain: “Do not be afraid! Let not your hearts be troubled.”

But that’s hard for us. Fear is all around us these days. Robert Penn Warren, the Southern writer, once said, “Nothing scares me more than scared people.” Scared people are tempted to run away from their core values of faith, hope and love. God’s love is more powerful than fear. The fact is the Bible says, “Perfect love casts out fear.” It doesn’t mean that we don’t have to be diligent, we don’t have to be careful, but we don’t have to live our lives out of fear. We can live out of the assurance that God’s love is more powerful than any of the forces that threaten us. That makes a big difference on how you face the world.

So I invite you to listen with me to the songs of Christmas, to Mary’s song, to the story of God’s love for you, the story that God is in control of this world, and he loves this world so much that he sent Christ to save it. We don’t have to be afraid.

I have a friend who grew up in the church. She was baptized, confirmed. She was in the church from the time she was a small child. She knew all the Christmas carols by heart. But in midlife she became inactive as a church goer. Life had dealt her some very difficult blows.

She said to me, “Christmas is hard for me. There is an excitement in the air that I don’t feel. I feel out of step.” Last year she said, “I forced myself to return to church on Christmas Eve. I had an amazing experience. One of the hymns we sang I knew by heart, “It Came Upon a Midnight Clear.” I sung it a hundred times, but last year when we sang these words, they penetrated to the very core of my heart”:

And ye, beneath life’s crushing load, Whose forms are bending low, Who toil along the climbing way With painful steps and slow, Look now! for glad and golden hours Come swiftly on the wing: O rest beside the weary road, And hear the angels sing.[2]

She said, “It dawned on me that that song was for me, that I was not alone. There is a God whose love is more powerful than any of the forces in the world.”

[2] Edmund Hamilton Sears, “It Came Upon the Midnight Clear,” The Presbyterian Hymnal (Louisville, KY: Westminster John Knox Press, 1990), 38. 3

Let me share a story that hit home with me. It’s about a young woman. Her name is Heather McYoung. She was bright, athletic, musically talented, a lovely young woman. She played the flute, worked as a life guard at a community pool, cleaned stables to pay for her riding lessons. She was just a good person.

One day she was walking home and was hit by a car. She was in a comma. The doctors weren’t sure if she would recover. Her grandmother went to the hospital and she said, “I want to go in and just sit with her for awhile.” So she went in and was sitting by her granddaughter and she began to sing a song that she used to sing to her as a little girl: “Frere Jaques, Frere Jaques.” The grandmother’s voice continued all alone beyond where Heather used to chime in. Softly, with tears in her eyes, the grandmother leaned over and whispered, “Heather, I need you to help me with this.” She started the song again. When it came time for Heather to join in, the girl coughed and gurgled, trying to sing. The attending nurse watching this take place said, “We have a miracle here.”

What is Christmas? It is the miracle of God beginning a mysteriously, wonderful song, and then leaning over, and whispering into our ear, “I need your help with this. Will you help me? I hope so.” Amen.

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